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The Zagreb Synagogue and the Story of Balkan Jewry

In the process of researching a novel, Michele Levy familiarized herself with the story of Balkan Jewry, and in particular with the history of the synagogue in the Croatian capital of Zagreb:

Jews lived in the Balkans from at least the 1st century CE; waves of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews came to the area—some as traders, many to flee persecution farther west. Synagogue ruins and graves along the Adriatic coast place Jews of the late Roman empire in Croatia nearly 2,000 years ago. Evidence shows, too, that Byzantine oppression caused some Jews to relocate even farther east, to the kingdom of Bulgaria. With the Crusades [and the pursuant anti-Semitic persecutions], many Jews from northern Europe spread southeast to avoid pogroms, and from 1492 the Spanish [expulsion] spawned Sephardi migration to the Ottoman empire. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with political anti-Semitism on the rise in the Hapsburg empire, many Ashkenazi Jews again looked eastward for safety.

A radical change for Jews came in 1299, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Byzantium and launched their vast empire. While classifying Jews, along with Catholics, Roma, and Orthodox Serbs, as raya, second-class citizens, the Ottomans safeguarded their minorities. This assured Jews better treatment than they had experienced under Byzantium or in the West. With Muslims, they were exempt from the devshirme, the “child tax,” which every four or five years conscripted young Christian boys, mostly Serbs, brought them back to Istanbul, educated them, and made from them a military and bureaucratic force.

The story of Zagreb’s synagogue embodies the fate of many Balkan Jews from post-World War II to the present. Completed in 1867, the synagogue became the first important building erected in Kaptol, Zagreb’s “lower town.” Hailed as a model of Moorish revival architecture, it drew many public officials and citizens to its opening and soon became a source of civic pride.

The synagogue was destroyed during World War II, when the Croatian government sided with the Nazis, and since then local Jews have struggled to mark its former location with a memorial.

Read more at Jewish Book Council

More about: Balkan Jewry, Holocaust, Ottoman Empire, Synagogues

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic